Interview with Author – Linda Parkinson-Hardman

About Linda Parkinson-Hardman:
This is a requested update to an old interview.

What inspires you to write?
People. I’m driven to help people make good choices about their health and their working lives and this crosses the boundaries of both publication and writing for the web.

My fiction writing is a ‘work in progress’ and my overactive imagination is the inspiration as I worry my nights away wondering what might happen to me and mine.

Tell us about your writing process.
Short, sharp bursts in between long periods of doing other writing ‘stuff’. I work part-time as an IT Trainer which involves me writing lots of training materials. I also run a social enterprise website which involves lots of writing for the web. The books and publications get squeezed into the middle somewhere. Depending on the type of work it will be highly structured and organised or it will be ‘get it down and see what happens’.

For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
Both – at the moment I’m trying a new technique of first and third person in the same book – it creates an oddly schizophrenic feeling.

What advice would you give other writers?
To read, to write and then read some more.

How did you decide how to publish your books?
It was an easy decision. The social enterprise needed to earn an income, a well respected publisher told me he wouldn’t touch a book about Hysterectomy as ‘there’s no market for it’. 10 years on, I’m pleased to say I’ve proved him wrong, but then I do ‘own’ the market sector in the UK.

Once the the hard work of understanding the process was done and the book was published it seemed silly to do anything other than self-publish. That’s been the case for almost everything I’ve produced.

What do you think about the future of book publishing?
It’s rosy – and as someone who once pronounced that the mouse and Windows would never take off I’m not going to say anything else.

What do you use?: Professional Editor

What genres do you write?: Contemporary fiction, health and fitness, business